Popp came to find me. “They’re almost ready, Obersturmführer.” The cordon with the Jews had moved to the lower part of the wood. The condemned men were waiting under the trees, in little groups; some were leaning on the tree trunks. Farther on, in the woods, Nagel was waiting with the Ukrainians. Some Jews at the bottom of a trench several yards long were still throwing shovelfuls of mud over the embankment. I leaned over: water filled the ditch; the Jews were digging with muddy water up to their knees. “That’s not a trench, that’s a swimming pool,” I remarked rather dryly to Nagel. He didn’t take the remark too kindly: “What do you want me to do, Obersturmführer? We’ve hit an aquifer, and it’s rising as they dig. We’re too close to the river. But I’m not going to spend all day having holes dug in this forest.” He turned to the Hauptscharführer. “Fine, that’s enough. Tell them to get out.” He was livid. “Your shooters are ready?” he asked. I understood that they were going to have the Ukrainians shoot. “Yes, Untersturmführer,” the Hauptscharführer replied. He turned to the Dolmetscher and explained the procedure. The Dolmetscher translated for the Ukrainians. Twenty of them came to stand in a line in front of the trench; five others took the Jews who had dug, and who were covered in mud, and made them kneel along the edge, their backs to the shooters. On an order from the Hauptscharführer, the Askaris shouldered their rifles and aimed at the Jews’ necks. But the count wasn’t right; there were supposed to be two shooters per Jew, but they had taken fifteen Jews to dig. The Hauptscharführer recounted, then ordered the Ukrainians to lower their rifles and had five of the Jews rise again and go wait on the side. Several of them were reciting something in a low voice, prayers no doubt, but aside from that they weren’t saying anything. “We should add some more Askaris,” suggested another noncom. “It would go faster.” A little discussion followed; there were only twenty-five Ukrainians in all; the noncom suggested adding five Orpos; the Hauptscharführer argued that they couldn’t deplete the cordon. Nagel, exasperated, made a decision: “Continue as is.” The Hauptscharführer barked an order and the Askaris raised their rifles. Nagel advanced a step. “At my command…” His voice quivered; he was making an effort to master it. “Fire!” The burst of shots crackled and I saw what looked like a red splatter, masked by the smoke of the rifles. Most of the men killed flew forward, face down in the water; two of them still lay there, huddled at the edge of the ditch. “Clean that up and bring the next ones,” Nagel ordered. Some Ukrainians took the two dead Jews by the arms and feet and threw them into the ditch; they landed with a loud splash of water, the blood streamed from their smashed heads and spurted onto the Ukrainians’ boots and green uniforms. Two men came forward with shovels and started cleaning the edge of the ditch, throwing clumps of bloody earth and whitish fragments of brain in to join the dead men. I went to look: the corpses were floating in the muddy water, some on their stomach, others on their backs with noses and beards sticking out of the water; blood was spreading out from their heads on the surface, like a fine layer of oil, but bright red; their white shirts were red too and little red trickles were flowing on their skin and in the hairs of their beards. They brought the second group, the five who had dug and five others from the edge of the wood, and set them on their knees facing the ditch, the floating bodies of their neighbors; one of them turned around to face the shooters, his head raised, and watched them in silence. I thought about these Ukrainians: How had they gotten to this point? Most of them had fought against the Poles, and then against the Soviets, they must have dreamed of a better future, for themselves and for their children, and now they found themselves in a forest, wearing a strange uniform and killing people who had done nothing to them, without any reason they could understand. What could they be thinking about all this? Still, when they were given the order, they shot, they pushed the bodies into the ditch and brought other ones, they didn’t protest. What would they think of all this later on? Once again, they had fired. Now we could hear moans coming from the ditch. “Oh hell, they’re not all dead,” the Hauptscharführer muttered.—“Well, finish them off,” Nagel shouted. On an order from the Hauptscharführer, two Askaris came forward and fired again into the ditch. The groans continued. They fired a third time. Next to them others were cleaning up the edge. Once again, a bit farther, ten more Jews were being brought up. I noticed Popp: he had taken a fistful of earth from the large pile next to the ditch and was contemplating it, kneading it between his fingers, smelling it, even taking a little in his mouth. “What is it, Popp?” He approached me: “Look at this earth, Obersturmführer. It’s good earth. A man could do worse than live here.” The Jews were kneeling down. “Throw that away, Popp,” I said to him.—“They told us that afterward we could come settle here, build farms. It’s a good region, that’s all I’m saying.”—“Be quiet, Popp.” The Askaris had fired another salvo. Once again, piercing shouts rose up from the ditch, moans. “Please, dear Germans! Please!” The Hauptscharführer ordered them finished off, but the shouts didn’t stop, we could hear men struggling in the water, Nagel was yelling too: “They shoot like lame idiots, your men! Make them go down in the hole.”—“But, Untersturmführer…”—“Make them go down!” The Hauptscharführer had the order translated. The Ukrainians started talking agitatedly. “What are they saying?” Nagel asked. “They don’t want to go in, Untersturmführer,” the Dolmetscher explained. “They say there’s no point, they can shoot from the edge.” Nagel was red. “Make them go down!” The Hauptscharführer seized one by the arm and pulled him over to the ditch; the Ukrainian resisted. Everyone was shouting now, in Ukrainian and German. A little farther on, the next group of Jews was waiting. Enraged, the chosen Askari threw his rifle on the ground and jumped into the ditch, slipped, floundered among the corpses and the dying. His comrade went down after him, holding on to the edge, and helped him get up. The Ukrainian swore and spat, covered in mud and blood. The Hauptscharführer held out his rifle. On the left we heard several gunshots, shouts; the men from the cordon were shooting into the woods: one of the Jews had taken advantage of the commotion to cut and run. “Did you get him?” Nagel called.—“I don’t know, Untersturmführer,” one of the policemen replied from a distance.—“Well then go look!” Two other Jews suddenly dashed to the other side and the Orpos started shooting: one of them fell immediately, the other vanished into the woods. Nagel had taken out his pistol and was waving it around, shouting contradictory orders. In the ditch, the Askari was trying to press his rifle against the forehead of a wounded Jew, but he was rolling in the water, his head kept disappearing beneath the surface. The Ukrainian finally fired blind, the shot took the Jew’s jaw away but still didn’t kill him, he was struggling, catching on to the Ukrainian’s legs. “Nagel,” I said.—“What?” His face was haggard, the pistol hung from his arm.—“I’m going to go wait in the car.” In the wood, we could hear gunshots, the Orpos were shooting at the fugitives; I glanced fleetingly at my fingers, to make sure I had taken out all the splinters. Near the ditch, one of the Jews started weeping.
Such amateurishness soon became the exception. As the weeks went by, the officers acquired experience, and the soldiers got used to the procedures; at the same time, one could see that everyone was searching for his place in all this, thinking about what was happening, each in his own way. At table, at night, the men discussed the actions, told anecdotes, and compared their experiences, some sadly, others cheerfully. Still others were silent; they were the ones who had to be watched. We had already had two suicides; and one night, a man woke up emptying his rifle into the ceiling, he had to be held down by force, and a noncom had almost been killed. Some reacted with brutality, sometimes sadism: they struck at the condemned, tormented them before making them die; the officers tried to control these outbursts, but it was difficult, there were excesses. Very often our men photographed the executions; in their quarters, they exchanged their photos for tobacco, or stuck them to the wall—anyone could order prints of them. We knew, through the military censors, that many of them sent these photos to their families in Germany; some even made little albums of them, with captions; this phenomenon worried the hierarchy but seemed impossible to control. Even the officers were losing their grip. Once, while the Jews were digging, I surprised Bohr singing: “The earth is cold, the earth is sweet, dig, little Jew, dig deep.” The Dolmetscher was translating; it shocked me deeply. I had known Bohr for some time now, he was a normal man, he had no particular animosity against the Jews, he did his duty as he was told; but obviously, it was eating at him, he wasn’t reacting well. Of course there were some genuine anti-Semites in the Kommando: Lübbe, for example, another Untersturmführer, seized the slightest occasion to rant against the Hebrews with extreme virulence, as if the whole of world Judaism were nothing but a vast conspiracy aimed at him, Lübbe. He tired everyone out with this. But his attitude toward the actions was strange: sometimes he behaved brutally, but sometimes in the morning he was overcome with violent diarrhea; he would report sick and had to be replaced. “God, how I hate those vermin,” he said as he watched them die, “but what a filthy job.” And when I asked him if his convictions didn’t help him bear it, he retorted: “Listen, just because I eat meat doesn’t mean I want to work in a slaughterhouse.” He was transferred anyhow, a few months later, when Dr. Thomas, the replacement for Brigadeführer Rasch, purged the Kommandos. But increasingly the officers as well as the men were becoming hard to control; they thought they were allowed to do all sorts of things, unimaginable things—and this is probably normal, with this sort of work the boundaries get confused, grow vague. And then there were some who stole from the Jews, kept gold watches, rings, money, even though everything was supposed to be turned in to the Kommandostab to be sent to Germany. During the actions, the officers were obliged to watch the Orpos, the Waffen-SS, the Askaris, to make sure they didn’t make off with anything. But officers too kept things. And also they drank, the sense of discipline started to unravel. One evening, we were billeted in a village, Bohr brought back two girls, Ukrainian peasants, and some vodka. He and Zorn and Müller started drinking with the girls and feeling them up, putting their hands under their skirts. I was sitting on my bed and trying to read. Bohr called to me: “Come take your fill too.”—“No, thanks.” One of the girls was unbuttoned, half naked, her flabby breasts drooped a little. This sour lust, this sagging flesh, disgusted me, but I had nowhere to go. “You’re not much fun, Doktor,” Bohr snapped at me. I looked at them as if I had X-ray vision: beneath the flesh I could clearly make out the skeletons; when Zorn embraced one of the girls it was as if their bones, separated by a thin gauze, knocked together; when they laughed, the grating sound burst forth from the jaws in the skulls; tomorrow, they would already be old, the girls would grow obese or, on the contrary, their exhausted skin would hang on their bones, their dry, empty teats would fall like a drained wine skin, and then Bohr and Zorn and these girls too would die and be buried under the cold earth, the soft earth, just like all those Jews mowed down in the prime of life, their mouths full of earth would laugh no more, so what was the use of this sad debauchery? If I asked Zorn that question, I knew what he’d say: “Just that: to have a little fun before I croak, nothing more, just a little pleasure,” but I had nothing against pleasure, I too could take my pleasure when I wanted it, no, it was probably their terrifying lack of self-awareness, that surprising way of never thinking about things, good or bad, of letting themselves be carried along with the current, killing without understanding why and without caring either, groping women because they were willing, drinking without even seeking to be absolved of their bodies. That is what I didn’t understand, but no one was asking me to understand anything.